I don't know what to do as I think I don't want my husband at the birth (in about 3 weeks) and he wants to be there. The reasons I don't want him there include:
He is perhaps the least empathetic person I know and is dreadful at dealing with other people's pain - if I am in pain he is almost the last person I want anywhere near me.
We went through years of infertility/ fertility treatment and miscarriages to get to this point and nearly divorced over it. I have forgiven him for his behaviour the times I miscarried but I can't forget some of the things he said. He got angry, he told me to pull myself together before the bleeding even had stopped, he told me to stop thinking about myself, he asked me three days after the second miscarriage (at 13 weeks) when I was in floods of tears how long I was going to 'carry on about it'. He was generally completely dismissive of what I went through and while clearly traumatised himself refused to acknowledge that it had any impact on him - he said it was something happening to me not him and I needed to deal with it.
Throughout this entire (difficult) pregnancy his coping mechanism has been to use 'humour' to respond to my illness and complications which I find distressing.
He has told people that his job during the birth will be to apologise to all the staff I piss off because he knows I'm going to 'carry on' like no one else. I am very anxious about the birth and the baby being OK and I am being induced due to high blood pressure in 3 weeks or so at the latest as they don't want me to go past 38 weeks. I can't envisage a scenario where his presence does anything other than increase my anxiety and with an induction in particular I feel like his presence is likely to make it less likely to succeed and that I'll wind up having a c-section. I feel like there is a fair bit of projection going on in his head about my ability to cope with things. For example he won't give blood because he is needle and blood phobic, won't take our dogs to the vet (he had to run out of the room and nearly fainted a couple of years ago when he was present when the puppy had a vaccination), and I had to arrange for our dentist to anaesthetise him so he could finally get his teeth cleaned after years of avoiding the dentist because of the apparently unbearable pain of a hygienists visit.
On the flip side maybe he would pull it together and it is the birth of his much wanted child too - I am so conflicted because rationally I think I should put myself (and therefore the baby) first and do everything possible - including keeping my husband away - to maximise my chance of a successful induction but I think if he could manage to be supportive it might go a long way to healing some of the hurt. Sorry for long rant, would love advice and to know if anyone else thought their husband would bottle it and be useless (or worse) only to be surprised??